In this installment, we profile Citrix Systems Inc. and their single sign-on solution built using a microservices approach on Azure Service Fabric. Also read about their business journey using Azure to implement single sign-on.Based in the United States with global offices, Citrix has been at the forefront of the digital enterprise since launching their first remote access product in 1989. Today Citrix is building the workspace of the future by operationalizing the technology that businesses need. Their solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations including 99 percent of the Fortune 100 and 98 percent of the Fortune 500.

CIP architecture based on Service Fabric

Citrix Identity Platform (CIP) is an implementation of OpenID Connect, a simple identity layer built on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. It authenticates users in different ways, generates access tokens for use in various systems, and provides a single-sign-on solution for Citrix products.

Figure: Leveraging Service Fabric to build the Citrix Identity Platform (CIP) on Azure.

An earlier implementation of the architecture included two virtual machine scale sets: one for the front end and one for the back end. The team thought they would need the additional scale to support the load. However, they discovered it was simpler—and just as scalable—to use only one scale set. The simpler deployment was easier to manage, and better still, running the instances of their microservices in a single scale set enables the team to deploy identical environments for development, testing, integration, and staging.

To understand their architecture and improvements, see the profile here: